Marble Slab Creamery

First, Cold Stone Creamery

I’d heard of the ice cream parlor Cold Stone Creamery but didn’t get a chance to try it out until February 2007 while vacationing with the Ginger Ninja in San Francisco. It’s an ice cream shop with a twist: they create ice cream mixes by taking an ice cream flavour and toppings such as oreo pieces and graham crackers and blending them by hand on a chilled marble-like slab, as shown in the video below:

While this is fun to watch as it is, workers at some Cold Stone franchises like to add a little “flair bartending” style to the process, as the videos below show:

And Now, Marble Slab Creamery

Marble Slab Creamery is the company from whom Cold Stone took the idea — they predate Cold Stone by five years. They’ve come to the ‘burbs surrounding Accordion City.

According to their site, they’ve got locations in:

• Aurora (SmartCentres Aurora East)
• Milton (RioCan Centre Milton)
• Newmarket (SilverCity complex)
• Oakville (on Lakeshore, close to Trafalgar Road)
• Thornhill (Bathurst Centre)
• Woodbridge (RioCan Colossus Centre)

…and “Toronto” is listed as “coming soon”.

I heard about Marble Slab from my coworkers on Friday at noon, and that night after dinner, the Ginger Ninja and I hopped in the car and went to Oakville to give it a try.

Wow, is it goooood. Wendy had white chocolate ice cream with smashed-up bits of Coffee Crisp and Oreos, while I had “Birthday Cake” (sweet cream ice cream with cake flavouring, similar to a flavour called “Cake Batter” at Cold Stone) with smashed-up bits of Kit Kat and Oreos. There seem to over a dozen ice cream flavours and two dozen or so toppings to choose from, as welll as a helluva lot of types of ice cream cones.

We’ll be back.

Related Reading

Quite unsurprisingly, there are Wikipedia entries for Cold Stone and Marble Slab creameries.